Empirical article
The Effects of Prequestions versus Postquestions on Memory Retention in Children

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2020.08.005Get rights and content

Prior research revealed that answering questions after study benefits learning in children, but it is unclear whether answering questions before study (i.e., prequestions) produces similar effects. Here, we report two experiments investigating this issue in 4th and 5th grade children. In both experiments, target-words from an encyclopedic text were either prequestioned, postquestioned, or reread. To assess memory retention, cued recall and multiple choice tests were administered after a 7-day interval, when children also rated their confidence on their responses. Both prequestions and postquestions resulted in overall greater memory retention than rereading, although postquestions resulted in greater cued recall performance than prequestions, a finding that was mirrored by the confidence data (i.e., postquestion > prequestion > reread). Thus, although both prequestions and postquestions were more beneficial for memory retention than rereading, postquestions seem to have promoted more recollection-based retrieval than prequestions, a finding we discuss from a dual-process model perspective.

Section snippets

Participants

Thirty-three children were initially recruited. Six children who did not show up for the second session of the experiment had their data excluded from the analysis. The remaining 27 children were 10.72 years old on average (SD = 0.4, 16 females) and were enrolled in the fifth grade of a private school in southeastern Brazil. Informed consent was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Federal University of Minas Gerais and by the children’s parents.

Materials

The stimulus-material consisted of a

Method

Except where noted, the method is identical to Experiment 1.

General Discussion

In two experiments, prequestions and postquestions were more beneficial for learning in elementary school children than restudy. Postquestions were more beneficial than prequestions when the delayed final test was a cued recall test. When the final test was a multiple choice test, however, both prequestions and postquestions showed equivalent benefits in comparison to restudy. Confidence on the multiple choice responses were higher for previously postquestioned, followed by prequestioned, and

Author Contributions

Natália Klik de Lima, conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, interpreted the data, and wrote the paper.

Antônio Jaeger, conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, and interpreted the data, and wrote the paper.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia sobre Comportamento, Cognição e Ensino, with support from the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq, Grant # 465686/2014-1), the São Paulo Research Foundation (Grant # 2014/50909-8), and the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES, Grant # 88887.136407/2017-00). This work was also supported by the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais (FAPEMIG, Grant # APQ-01174-14), and by

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  • Author Note

    Natália Klik de Lima, Department of Psychology, Federal University of Minas Gerais,Antonio Carlos Avenue, 6627, Belo Horizonte, MG, 31270-901, Brazil.

    Antônio Jaeger, Department of Psychology, Federal University of Minas Gerais, and Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia sobre Comportamento, Cognição e Ensino, Brazil.

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